Come on, people.  We had a nice discussion going.

That being said, I think that since socialism had been raised as a topic again, Eclipse Phase itself would be one heck of an object lesson.  Like, take a habitat that was trying to organize itself along anarchist principles, with a focus on community property.  Well, whoops, Mr. Forkswarm has copied himself everywhere.  He has claimed the commons, and now, numerically, is a plurality.  So, what now? What is the fair means of allocating resources like morphs when the need will scale to absorb all surpluses?

When Mr. Forkswarm says "All of me are people, and all of me deserve the same rights as any of you singletons.", and others say "Bullshit, we're not completely stopping our charity-housing of refugee infomorphs for your ego trip.", how does that get resolved? If the matter actually was reputation-based, then the factions would hold a vote and realize "Shit, 99.85% of our membership actually does want to give all our posessions to Mr. Forkswarm."  Because that's what reputation means.

The designers really went through a lot of trouble to recognize that someone has the admin keys to the nanofactories and stack-readers and morph-assembly-plants and all of the actual physical infrastructure, and that those individuals, not the greater unwashed masses of a faction, are the ones who control things.  The ones who actually decide whether or not Mr. Forkswarm is full of shit or not are the ones with power.  And the ones doing so do so from the assumption that they do own the means of production themselves, and that they are not to be turned over to the people, no matter how many of the people Mr. Forkswarm actually is.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 05:44:30 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 28, 2021, 05:18:29 PMIt's an awesome villain ideology, right? I use a variation of this for the hivemind aliens in my original scifi setting.

Even being a hivemind would be more socially cohesive then Eclipse Phase, because at least a hivemind is designed from top down specifically with some things as expendable and others as not. A drone wouldn't torture another drone (unless needed by the hive) because it's bred and created to provide a strictly utilitarian function.

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 05:23:34 PM
Ok, that's a philosophical debate issue here. I mean what you said has validity and in a good point, but for millennia people have not been duplicatable and still treated horribly, enslaved, worked to beat, subject to genocide, etc even in a world where the can't be reloaded, copies, etc. So thinking the SP  EP would will be worse than what we have nos because people can be duplicated and reloaded might have  validity, i admit, but i don't think it will make the world worse.

It most certainly would. In such a world, enslavement wouldn't be punished by whip or chain, but just mentally adjusting you until your subservient to your captor. In such a world there can be no genuine emotion because emotions are things you have complete control over. Sadness or happiness are just switches you can flick on. For yourselves or others. There would be no reason to live in any sort of self-restraint because you could just flip a switch and feel ultimate pleasure forever.

And that's not assuming they don't just delete all of you with an army of duplicate drones.
It's already an issue true that less ethical can get power in our world. But in the EP world, the less ethical would get ABSOLUTE power. It just sounds like the writers didn't think through the utterly horrific consequences of their world.

That's just the existential horror setting in.

The point of playing in such a setting is to be moral anyways. You can argue that since people are target's of moral obligation, then their is no way to reduce that to meaninglessness. The ethical questions then arise, is forking of altered copies of willing workers with right mindset equivalent to slavery? Well yes, the person doing it just convinced themselves it wasn't the case. It's clear cut once you toss all that dark enlightenment bullshit out the window.

Buuuuut, you make villains with somewhat compelling arguments. You might make players uncomfortable. Especially in this situation. If you have a population of people willing to do effectively slave labor, is it still bad? Now you got an excellent Sci-fi moment of, "huh that seems applicable to the radical American anti-union capitalist movement. Just because idiots want to be exploited does not mean the exploitation is ethical."

Transhumanist sci-fi has tons of socialist themes. It's inherent to the concept of, "so much of the economy can be automated that only a select few do any sort of traditional wealth generation".

Quote from: Brad on April 28, 2021, 05:47:48 PM
I've gleaned from this thread that someone has uploaded their consciousness to RPG.net and it morphed into a self-loathing sociopath that started a thread on this site in an attempt to do some low effort trolling. Eclipse Phase in full effect.

Fuck you die.

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 28, 2021, 05:59:54 PMThe point of playing in such a setting is to be moral anyways.

That's like demanding morality of wasps. Are wasps immoral? The creatures of EP are not humans but are different beings altogether. Applying human morals to them is foolish.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 05:44:30 PM

It most certainly would. In such a world, enslavement wouldn't be punished by whip or chain, but just mentally adjusting you until your subservient to your captor. In such a world there can be no genuine emotion because emotions are things you have complete control over. Sadness or happiness are just switches you can flick on. For yourselves or others. There would be no reason to live in any sort of self-restraint because you could just flip a switch and feel ultimate pleasure forever.

And that's not assuming they don't just delete all of you with an army of duplicate drones.
It's already an issue true that less ethical can get power in our world. But in the EP world, the less ethical would get ABSOLUTE power. It just sounds like the writers didn't think through the utterly horrific consequences of their world.

The X-risk (existential risk) movement tries to put a number to the risk to various humanity-ending threats. Giant meteors, vacuum decay, aliens, etc. It's not concerned with dire but survivable risks, like most climate change projections (except the tiny handful of outliers that involve runaway feedback loops), only things that end humanity. Which can be extinction, but also can be anything that removes all of humanity's future potential. For instance, aliens coming down and turning us all into pets, with no chance of escape.

One more likely example of this second type of threat is a perpetual totalitarian state. Most of the projections put the chances pretty low, but I think they're dramatically underestimating the risk. Totalitarian states in the past have failed to due to outside factors putting pressure on the state. The Soviet Union being pressured by the West's economic supremacy, for instance. Yet we seem to heading toward a world government. National boundaries have been remarkably stable since WW2, but international bodies like the UN and regional blocs like the EU or SCO have been taking on more and more state-like characteristics, including enforceable lawmaking powers, sovereign currencies, and more. Central power is in ascendance, and it's not particularly democratic. Just look at China, or the unelected power of the EC.

So what happens when the world gradually slides into a super-state? Look at how much control the KGB, GRU, and stasi exerted over their citizenry. Snitches were everywhere, and freedom of expression was almost impossible. Works were shared and smuggled out, but it was rare and risky. People had to watch everything they said, and felt like they were being constantly spied on, even when they weren't.

But we're no longer living in that world. We're living in a world where people can be spied on, 24/7. Tracking every movement, analyzing everyone's social media posts, and more are all possible using machine intelligence and cameras everywhere. The few outlets of escape or just freedom to express themselves that were available to dissidents in the USSR have all been closed off. A totalitarian world state seems more likely than not, before self-sustaining colonies are established off planet. And once that happens, how would it ever end? With that degree of power over the populace, the ruling class would cement itself into a perpetual oligarchy. The only real question is whether the control would be soft (a la BNW) or hard (1984). The soft route is probably the surest way to total control, but once established it would almost certainly become hard.

And if they can read your mind, make a copy and interrogate it, and change your brain's operating parameters or memories? That's much, much, much, worse.

Quote from: robertliguori on April 28, 2021, 05:54:53 PM
Come on, people.  We had a nice discussion going.

That being said, I think that since socialism had been raised as a topic again, Eclipse Phase itself would be one heck of an object lesson.  Like, take a habitat that was trying to organize itself along anarchist principles, with a focus on community property.  Well, whoops, Mr. Forkswarm has copied himself everywhere.  He has claimed the commons, and now, numerically, is a plurality.  So, what now? What is the fair means of allocating resources like morphs when the need will scale to absorb all surpluses?

When Mr. Forkswarm says "All of me are people, and all of me deserve the same rights as any of you singletons.", and others say "Bullshit, we're not completely stopping our charity-housing of refugee infomorphs for your ego trip.", how does that get resolved? If the matter actually was reputation-based, then the factions would hold a vote and realize "Shit, 99.85% of our membership actually does want to give all our posessions to Mr. Forkswarm."  Because that's what reputation means.

The designers really went through a lot of trouble to recognize that someone has the admin keys to the nanofactories and stack-readers and morph-assembly-plants and all of the actual physical infrastructure, and that those individuals, not the greater unwashed masses of a faction, are the ones who control things.  The ones who actually decide whether or not Mr. Forkswarm is full of shit or not are the ones with power.  And the ones doing so do so from the assumption that they do own the means of production themselves, and that they are not to be turned over to the people, no matter how many of the people Mr. Forkswarm actually is.

A lot of hard-line socialist refuse to dig into practicality. It comes from the assumption that without negative influences, people are generally good.

The problem is the select assholes that ruin everything for no reason other than they can. Mr. Forkswarm is unjustified evil which boggles the minds of true believers.

In Nova Praxis, the few owners of the means of production do have all the real power and that is a source of conflict. The reputation economy is a way to "bread & circus" the masses into contentment. The true power brokers still sit at the top willout having to deal with hundreds of millions of starving terrorist. Human population is oddly on a decline BECAUSE those truly in charge don't need all these people and soft discourage more of them (all official morphs are sterile).

Nova Praxis makes the assumption that future is almost unfathomably better, but there are still new and nuanced problems.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 06:04:54 PM

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 28, 2021, 05:59:54 PMThe point of playing in such a setting is to be moral anyways.

That's like demanding morality of wasps. Are wasps immoral? The creatures of EP are not humans but are different beings altogether. Applying human morals to them is foolish.

Well you would be a villain in EP.

It's simple ethical theory that if your conclusion is no ethics, then you thought about it wrong.

Quote from: robertliguori on April 28, 2021, 05:54:53 PM
Come on, people.  We had a nice discussion going.

That being said, I think that since socialism had been raised as a topic again, Eclipse Phase itself would be one heck of an object lesson.  Like, take a habitat that was trying to organize itself along anarchist principles, with a focus on community property.  Well, whoops, Mr. Forkswarm has copied himself everywhere.  He has claimed the commons, and now, numerically, is a plurality.  So, what now? What is the fair means of allocating resources like morphs when the need will scale to absorb all surpluses?

When Mr. Forkswarm says "All of me are people, and all of me deserve the same rights as any of you singletons.", and others say "Bullshit, we're not completely stopping our charity-housing of refugee infomorphs for your ego trip.", how does that get resolved? If the matter actually was reputation-based, then the factions would hold a vote and realize "Shit, 99.85% of our membership actually does want to give all our posessions to Mr. Forkswarm."  Because that's what reputation means.

The designers really went through a lot of trouble to recognize that someone has the admin keys to the nanofactories and stack-readers and morph-assembly-plants and all of the actual physical infrastructure, and that those individuals, not the greater unwashed masses of a faction, are the ones who control things.  The ones who actually decide whether or not Mr. Forkswarm is full of shit or not are the ones with power.  And the ones doing so do so from the assumption that they do own the means of production themselves, and that they are not to be turned over to the people, no matter how many of the people Mr. Forkswarm actually is.

Ok, now a fork requites hardware to run it, it doesn't just run on thin air or vacuum, it it requires hardware to run it. So mr. forkswarm would have to be having the hardware to run his army of forks and the power to run that hardware et al. That assumes they're just infomorphs, forks in some of physical hardware get even harder to do.

This issue was addressed in an EP book, pardon me if i haven't got chapter and verse memorized, but a person was saying he could fork himself for  regular reasonable work, but it he tried to fork himself like 20 times or so his fellow community members would start to object, possibly in very expressive terms.

In ep you have like at least 3 rep ratings and you can lose or gain them for anything. A bad rep does hurt you. In fact one thing i find scary in ep is the idea of cancel culture becoming kill culture. A guy was new to a particular habitat and really didn't get it, he made a few mistakes and immediately got hit with bad red that lowered his score to the point he lost the job he was doing and capable of doing and ended up in a cheap biomoprh doing external maintenance and being exposed to radiation that was slowly killing him. All because he made a few gaffes.

I mean, i'm a genuine baby eating satan worshipping atheist socialist communist nazi (according to the right ) and i find the  radical leftist cancel culture/summary execution culture over on the evil site intolerable and i agree with bill maher that cancel culture has reached the level of summary execution for people's careers and futures.

https://www.facebook.com/Maher/videos/201022374881643

I mean look at modern net culture and how it can devastate people's life outside the net, imagine that writ large. That's what a lot of things could go like in EP.

Hell, i was viciously dogpiled by the far left recently on facebook for only agreeing with them 95% of the way.

One big problem in ep would certainly be the absolute balkanization of transhumanity kind of like how the internet has balkanized into all these tiny little echo  chambers, like the big red+blue, where only ONE view can be expressed, only ONE opinion is allowed, only ABSOLUTE AGREEMENT with the collective hivemind is tolerated.

I mean, why fill a habitat with forks of yourself when you can create one where everyone has to have the same iedology your little clique has has?

Transhumanity is balkanized in EP, not even the near extinction of it has produced an ability to work together against common threats. That's a major issue in EP and they acknowledge it.

But one guy forkswarming himself and taking over  a hab? Not really going to happen especially since a lot of habs allow personal weapons.

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 28, 2021, 06:08:11 PM

Quote from: robertliguori on April 28, 2021, 05:54:53 PM
Come on, people.  We had a nice discussion going.

That being said, I think that since socialism had been raised as a topic again, Eclipse Phase itself would be one heck of an object lesson.  Like, take a habitat that was trying to organize itself along anarchist principles, with a focus on community property.  Well, whoops, Mr. Forkswarm has copied himself everywhere.  He has claimed the commons, and now, numerically, is a plurality.  So, what now? What is the fair means of allocating resources like morphs when the need will scale to absorb all surpluses?

When Mr. Forkswarm says "All of me are people, and all of me deserve the same rights as any of you singletons.", and others say "Bullshit, we're not completely stopping our charity-housing of refugee infomorphs for your ego trip.", how does that get resolved? If the matter actually was reputation-based, then the factions would hold a vote and realize "Shit, 99.85% of our membership actually does want to give all our posessions to Mr. Forkswarm."  Because that's what reputation means.

The designers really went through a lot of trouble to recognize that someone has the admin keys to the nanofactories and stack-readers and morph-assembly-plants and all of the actual physical infrastructure, and that those individuals, not the greater unwashed masses of a faction, are the ones who control things.  The ones who actually decide whether or not Mr. Forkswarm is full of shit or not are the ones with power.  And the ones doing so do so from the assumption that they do own the means of production themselves, and that they are not to be turned over to the people, no matter how many of the people Mr. Forkswarm actually is.

A lot of hard-line socialist refuse to dig into practicality. It comes from the assumption that without negative influences, people are generally good.

The problem is the select assholes that ruin everything for no reason other than they can. Mr. Forkswarm is unjustified evil which boggles the minds of true believers.

In Nova Praxis, the few owners of the means of production do have all the real power and that is a source of conflict. The reputation economy is a way to "bread & circus" the masses into contentment. The true power brokers still sit at the top willout having to deal with hundreds of millions of starving terrorist. Human population is oddly on a decline BECAUSE those truly in charge don't need all these people and soft discourage more of them (all official morphs are sterile).

Nova Praxis makes the assumption that future is almost unfathomably better, but there are still new and nuanced problems.

I looked up nova praxis, and wow, it looks like a close to ripoff of EP. I guess that means it's popular enoughto create an imitator.

I'd say Ep is about the future is in a bad shape after the titan thing, and things are uncertain, but hey, there's still hope. That's what the PCs are for.

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 28, 2021, 06:10:02 PMWell you would be a villain in EP.

For pointing out the innate flaws of the system? In that setting, I would be one of the evil bio-conservatives so I suppose so.

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 06:22:27 PM
But one guy forkswarming himself and taking over  a hab? Not really going to happen especially since a lot of habs allow personal weapons.

Not unless one guy subtly mind controls everybody in the hab beforehand. And the only preventative measures would be invasive forced checking of minds. So in essence the only cure to the problem would be a different kind of problem.

Science fiction is all about "what if". The problem with EP is not only that it posits so many "what ifs", it's that it does not deal with any of them. How the hell are you as a player going to interact with a world so irrational and foreign?

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 05:16:08 PM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 28, 2021, 04:45:33 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 04:39:44 PM
Wow.

I left here in disgust but decided to see what happened to my thread a couple days later. I was amazed to see a real discussion growing out of the shitstorm some assholes here turned it into.

In true drama queen fashion, you flounce out like a little bitch, and then come back because you didn't really want to leave, you just wanted attention.

QuoteI'm glad to see a decent discussion started here after a couple days and may drop in to see if any useful things come up. The sad thing is EP would be such a great game to discuss at the site of total evil, but it's such a shit hole of what i have to call the fascist left that i just can't stand to go there anymore. Plus i'm kinda hoping something happens to it soon.

This place is frankly a right wing shithole but at least some posters here are  worth reading and you can post dissent without being banhammered 5 minutes later.

You just have to act like an adult and not come in swinging and then complain when people punch back. If you're up for a suggestion, how about trying leaving the politics out altogether. You started that crap, and then participated in the replies.

Ok, time to start blocking trolls so i'm not bothered by their shitlording.

FUCK! This board doesn't have a block function?!

It's buried in user settings.

Quote from: Pat on April 28, 2021, 06:05:15 PM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 05:44:30 PM

It most certainly would. In such a world, enslavement wouldn't be punished by whip or chain, but just mentally adjusting you until your subservient to your captor. In such a world there can be no genuine emotion because emotions are things you have complete control over. Sadness or happiness are just switches you can flick on. For yourselves or others. There would be no reason to live in any sort of self-restraint because you could just flip a switch and feel ultimate pleasure forever.

And that's not assuming they don't just delete all of you with an army of duplicate drones.
It's already an issue true that less ethical can get power in our world. But in the EP world, the less ethical would get ABSOLUTE power. It just sounds like the writers didn't think through the utterly horrific consequences of their world.

The X-risk (existential risk) movement tries to put a number to the risk to various humanity-ending threats. Giant meteors, vacuum decay, aliens, etc. It's not concerned with dire but survivable risks, like most climate change projections (except the tiny handful of outliers that involve runaway feedback loops), only things that end humanity. Which can be extinction, but also can be anything that removes all of humanity's future potential. For instance, aliens coming down and turning us all into pets, with no chance of escape.

One more likely example of this second type of threat is a perpetual totalitarian state. Most of the projections put the chances pretty low, but I think they're dramatically underestimating the risk. Totalitarian states in the past have failed to due to outside factors putting pressure on the state. The Soviet Union being pressured by the West's economic supremacy, for instance. Yet we seem to heading toward a world government. National boundaries have been remarkably stable since WW2, but international bodies like the UN and regional blocs like the EU or SCO have been taking on more and more state-like characteristics, including enforceable lawmaking powers, sovereign currencies, and more. Central power is in ascendance, and it's not particularly democratic. Just look at China, or the unelected power of the EC.

So what happens when the world gradually slides into a super-state? Look at how much control the KGB, GRU, and stasi exerted over their citizenry. Snitches were everywhere, and freedom of expression was almost impossible. Works were shared and smuggled out, but it was rare and risky. People had to watch everything they said, and felt like they were being constantly spied on, even when they weren't.

But we're no longer living in that world. We're living in a world where people can be spied on, 24/7. Tracking every movement, analyzing everyone's social media posts, and more are all possible using machine intelligence and cameras everywhere. The few outlets of escape or just freedom to express themselves that were available to dissidents in the USSR have all been closed off. A totalitarian world state seems more likely than not, before self-sustaining colonies are established off planet. And once that happens, how would it ever end? With that degree of power over the populace, the ruling class would cement itself into a perpetual oligarchy. The only real question is whether the control would be soft (a la BNW) or hard (1984). The soft route is probably the surest way to total control, but once established it would almost certainly become hard.

And if they can read your mind, make a copy and interrogate it, and change your brain's operating parameters or memories? That's much, much, much, worse.

Hiya pat, some good points you raise there.  Let me respond here.

The sad thing is that today in the world most people, most large groups, can be essentially manipulated into doing whatever the select few want. Here, have a look at this:



Now you may not like what goering is saying there, i sure as blood don't, but can you say it's not the ghawdawful truth? Mob psychology, appealing to the lowest common denominator,  etc, it usually succeeds to manipulating a large enough chunk of the population, what the russians may have fairly called the "lumpen proletariat",  into giving power to the wrong people.

Fuck, look at how successful that ochre tumor in the white house from Fed.2017-Feb.2021 was at this old game.

i'm also reminded of a story in Asimov where a 'robot' as he called them developed a certain telepathic ability, and found out he could manipulate individual minds or even crowds, and noted that it was actually easier to influence a crowd than one single person. This tallies with the rule of thumb about mobs: The IQ of a mob is the IQ of the dumbest person it in divided by the number of people in the mob."

So what you said about being able to edit an individual ego any way you want is true, but really, does it matter when just the same old techniques of propaganda that were so successful in the 1930's and that the ocher tumor and rupe murdoch's propaganda empire use today are effective enough to control enough of the masses to take and maintain a lot of power over society?

Now there are a couple things to consider in EP. one is the fall, where 95% of the race was wiped out and earth was lost to transhumanity. maybe many people see that as the end result not of science and technology per se, but as the result of letting unaccountable, faceless, nameless leaders do what they wanted with no oversight or say from the public, no one to advocate for the best interests of the many instead of the few.

So, hopefully, a lot of people, like, say, firewall, have a new determination to take an active role in how things are done instead of letting some cabal of elites do everything. A lot of EP scenarios are basically that sort of thing. Likewise autonomists and other groups like scum have a more consensus mentality rather than a strict hierarchy.

Another issue in EP might be that a lot of issues are complex and hard to grasp, and maybe pe0ple don't have time or effort to spare studying complex, multifaceted issues in depth in order to make a good decision.

So, in Ep you can make a fork of yourself to do that kind of deep study for you, to access databases, look up history, see what the facts are, study and weight the issues, make an informed decision then reintegrate that fork into yourself instantly know what it learned and what it thought as a copy of you., instead of letting a talking head rhat looks like a stupid, evil pillsbury doughboy tell you what to believe.



So in Ep there are a lot of issues and ghawd knows that world has the potential to be a horror beyond words, but it's also possible to save some of it and make it better. That's what PCs do.

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 05:26:10 PM

Quote from: Pat on April 28, 2021, 05:18:10 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 04:39:44 PM
I left here in disgust but decided to see what happened to my thread a couple days later. I was amazed to see a real discussion growing out of the shitstorm some assholes here turned it into.

You incorrectly pluralized asshole. There was only one asshole.

Notice how real discussion only happened when the person stinking up the thread left.

oh fuck you your goatcocksucking shitstain. Tired of the ASSHOLES here and not bothering to waste much time on them.

You've been here for a few days, and made 27 posts so far. You came in bitching about politics while spewing yours in the very first post in this thread. You continue to weep and gnash your teeth when called out for your assinine behavior.

If you act like a child, expect to be treated as such.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 28, 2021, 06:58:49 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 05:26:10 PM

Quote from: Pat on April 28, 2021, 05:18:10 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 04:39:44 PM
I left here in disgust but decided to see what happened to my thread a couple days later. I was amazed to see a real discussion growing out of the shitstorm some assholes here turned it into.

You incorrectly pluralized asshole. There was only one asshole.

Notice how real discussion only happened when the person stinking up the thread left.

Fuck off. You're as much an asshole as the mods on the vile site.



oh fuck you your goatcocksucking shitstain. Tired of the ASSHOLES here and not bothering to waste much time on them.

You've been here for a few days, and made 27 posts so far. You came in bitching about politics while spewing yours in the very first post in this thread. You continue to weep and gnash your teeth when called out for your assinine behavior.

If you act like a child, expect to be treated as such.